What is Mine to Carry?

After 15 years in ministry, I find myself asking deeper questions about how I minister and how I want to move forward. I am expanding, learning, embracing new ideas, and remaining open at the top to what is possible as I navigate my ministry through a world of rapid change.

My God is current. It is not confined to the past or limited by old ideas. It is expressing Itself as me, as you, and as all of creation. As I expand, my awareness of that Divine Presence expands as well. It is absent nowhere and is revealed as each of us allows this magnificent Creative Intelligence to express through our lives. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are both inlets and outlets for God.” I choose to do my best to be both.

One of the greatest challenges I encounter is my deeply sympathetic nature. I naturally want to console others and understand their struggles—whether they involve relationships, health, finances, or creative expression. Too often, I have softened my message because I wanted people to feel comforted before they felt challenged. I wanted to protect them from discomfort instead of trusting their own capacity to grow through it.

I realize now that I have not always served others well by doing so. I am no longer trying to convince anyone of their magnificence. Magnificence cannot be argued into existence; it can only be recognized when someone is ready to see it. Nor am I here to explain away every challenge as though I possess the answer to another person’s journey.

What I do know is this: no one is inherently more or less than anyone else. Every person is walking a unique spiritual path, and each of us awakens in our own time and in our own way. I am not responsible for managing another person’s emotional journey or removing their discomfort. My responsibility is to remain faithful to the Truth as I understand it and to offer it with love, clarity, and authenticity. What another person chooses to do with that offering is their sacred work.

My own journey must continue to expand. It cannot expand if I spend my life carrying everyone’s unhealed wounds. Nor can it expand if I neglect my own. I am beginning to see that what often presents itself as a problem I feel compelled to solve is, in truth, an invitation to release my need to control what has never been mine to carry.

Compassion does not require me to carry what belongs to someone else. Love can walk beside another without taking over their journey.

Here I stand in my fifteenth year of ministry and my thirteenth year of leading a spiritual community full-time. I trust that the Universe is filling our seats with those who are ready for the message I am here to share. What they do with that message is their journey.

I am not a guru. I am not anyone’s savior. I am simply a woman on a journey—a woman who has practiced Science of Mind for a lifetime and consciously embraced it for the last twenty-eight years, ever since I first walked into a Science of Mind Center and heard a minister speak words that changed the course of my life.

She was experiencing many of the same questions I am asking today. I took her message into my heart, allowed it to transform me, and became more of who I truly am. That journey has never stopped. Every day I continue becoming more fully Rita.

My prayer today is simple. May I always be placed where my gifts can be of the greatest service. May I continue to grow in wisdom, remain vibrant and expansive, and speak Truth with courage and love. And may I remember that my calling is not to rescue others, but to embody the possibility of what a life rooted in Spirit can become.

Love and Aloha,

Rev. Dr. Rita Andriello-Feren, Author and Co-Founding Spiritual Director CSL Kaua’i

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